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Whom Have You Met? Faces of Literature

What literature endows the workers with is not the awareness of their condition. It is the passion that can make them break their condition, because it is the passion that their condition forbade. ~ Jacques Rancière

What international authors are introduced in the curriculum of language arts in your state/country? The list might vary across teachers, but I guess it might be possible to recognize something like a canon – a list of international authors that a considerable number of people in your state/country are likely to know as a result of going to school within a particular historical period. What does the selection of these authors demonstrate? How does it affect us?

In this exhibition, I make a modest attempt to offer a list of the international authors and works introduced in the national curriculum of language arts for grades 10-12 in Vietnam. Reforms have been happening, but since 1990s up to now the canon is relatively stable. Apart from the authors featured in the current national mainstream series of language arts textbooks, I also include Sergei Yesenin, Louis Aragon, and Yasunari Kawabata, whom I favor in the textbooks of my time.

Installing the exhibition, I have read some new works, revisited the known ones, and reexamined my cultural background. All of the works have been readily translated in English, and this opens up opportunities. We might discover the points of connection we might have already had and forge new ones. I look forward to conversations with you. I am interested in seeing how a nation’s identity is constructed through its canon of international authors and what themes of humanity are present/absent.

As I assemble the exhibition, I also think of the highschoolers in Vietnam who might be studying language arts and EFL (English as a foreign language) separately. I think that if I had been exposed to literary works in English earlier, my relationship with English would have been less painful. On the other hand, reading world literatures in Vietnamese brought me experience that I could not have enjoyed if I only read them in English.

The national curriculum of language arts in Vietnam consists of three components, văn học (literature), tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), and làm văn (composition). The international authors and works in this exhibition are officially introduced in the literature component. Segments of text written by international authors also appear in the other components.*